


Selective Memory

by aurora_ff



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: BuckyNat week, Buckynat Week Mini Bang, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hydra (Marvel), POV Natasha Romanov, Porn with Feelings, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Spycraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 07:27:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3561275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_ff/pseuds/aurora_ff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the days shortly after S.H.I.E.L.D.’s downfall, Natasha secretly visits Captain America’s exhibit at the Smithsonian to learn new details about the now-not-nameless Winter Soldier; the very man that was both her mentor and lover in her past life as a Red Room operative. Next stop, Kiev; reviving her own personal mission to retrieve the old KGB file on James “Bucky” Barnes. </p><p>With new facts and resurrected emotions, Natasha begins to have recurring dreams of him that reveal different facets of the man’s character throughout his life. Given the chance to have her lost love remember and cherish her after so many years, what price would she pay to be reunited?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Selective Memory

Holed up in Sam Wilson’s apartment, Natasha sat with Steve Rogers at their new ally’s kitchen table looking over a printout of a map of Fort Meade, doing the last planning to break the Falcon suit out of the secured facility there. The morning was warm, bright, and hopeful. For a few hours, she was safe.

Sam was already out the door, headed towards a plain storage locker that Natasha kept ready with cash, fake IDs, and a small arsenal of her arms and technology. No one at S.H.I.E.L.D. was aware of it; Natasha was too seasoned at what she did to deny herself her own secret escape hatches. She, Steve, and Sam would need every last bit of it in the next twenty-four hours and more.

With Wilson’s departure, Natasha was alone again with the man who declared his absolute trust of her just an hour before. She wanted, _needed,_ somehow to be worthy of that.

“Sam should be back before ten-hundred,” she confirmed. “Then I’ll do a little hacking into Sitwell’s cell, get his schedule for the day, and we’ll go from there. It’s a pretty straight-forward op, Cap. Clear enemies now, right?”

Steve’s hand rested on the top of the classified file Sam had presented them. She was well aware that her companion hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours or more. And super-soldier serum or not, no one could go forever without rest.

“You asked Hill...when Fury was on the table...” he began, tiredly. “You asked about the ballistics...if they were Soviet made.”

Along with everything else just-about-perfect about Rogers, it seems that his memory was sharper than the edge of a tactical knife. Natasha felt her stomach knot, but then her rehearsed cover-story came to her rescue, and she relaxed. There were no lies in it; there was also plenty of left-out truth.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I told you that the Winter Soldier came for me and the engineer. In Odessa. S.H.I.E.L.D. ran what they collected at the scene. I asked Maria about the rounds recovered from Fury because I needed to know _for certain_ what we were up against.” Natasha used ‘we’ very deliberately. She and Cap’s fate in this had become entwined. Another debt, another tie.

“The Winter Soldier.” Steve continued, tiredly. He was almost mumbling. “The night that he assassinated Nick. His arm...the metal one. It had a red star. I’ve seen it before on the uniforms of Soviet officers. It’s a _Russian_ symbol.”

The nails of her left hand dug into her own thigh under the table. Steve was close, so close, to knowing the full of it. Of her and the Soldier. He was only a few questions away from the revelation that she and Russia’s greatest assassin had a terrible secret between them: a lifetime ago, they were both capable of still feeling, still yearning and still rebelling, even when their masters had stripped them of so much else. Their orders were always to lie and to kill. No one had explicitly forbade them from loving, at least not at the start. And so they had.

“Uh-huh,” she agreed, noncommittally. Whatever thing Rogers asked next, she felt bound to tell the truth. Because Cap had saved her; because she owed him, however he brushed it off.

“At the hospital, you said that most of the intelligence community considered him a ghost story. But the Soviets...he must have been their operative once? Doing HYDRA’s work from behind the Iron Curtain.”

Natasha nodded. “I think so.”

And then Steve sighed deeply and leaned in, resting his elbows on the table, looking directly at her with those too-blue and earnest eyes. “Natasha…you must know if...”

Fuck. He was about to discover it all, and she would have to re-live the anguish of the retelling: of how they were caught, and of how Natasha was forced to witness the erasure of almost everything precious and human left in the dark-haired man most called simply _’Soldat’_ or ‘the American’ or ‘the Asset’. She couldn’t afford that today, however much she was indebted to Cap for pulling her out of the Lehigh bunker.

“There must be records of the Winter Soldier, somewhere,” Steve rambled on, a brief gesture to Sam’s Falcon dossier before them both. “Something that proves he’s more than a phantom.”

It felt like a stay of execution. Only long practice kept Natasha from visibly showing relief.

“Yes. I’m certain there is, Steve,” she made her near-confession. “I came close to those records a few years ago, but someone, I guess HYDRA, was watching. There were threats on the people that were helping me; good people. And they’re impossible to access just now,” she commented. “My face and yours are on every NSA bulletin within the country, and probably Interpol to boot.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed, lifting up a hand to stifle a yawn. “I’m just trying to keep ahead of this.”

“Hey. I have an idea.” She changed the subject, and Rogers was too exhausted to notice. “How about we take a break and do the dishes like good houseguests?”

“Sounds good, Nat.”

Somehow, she felt like as if had just missed a bullet aimed straight at her heart.

* * *

About six hours later, the bullet got her in the shoulder instead. The ache of it was nothing compared to the shock of Steve’s past, his recognition of the Winter Soldier, an identity at last. And now, seventy years later, the living weapon they made from Bucky Barnes was on a kill-mission against Captain America and Black Widow. Steve’s best friend; her lost lover. It was almost too much for Natasha to believe.

“He looked right at me,” Rogers recounted. “He didn’t even know me.”

But he had, for a moment. She witnessed the brief glance of confusion, the pause before the Winter Soldier drew and meant to fire his last pistol. She saw it all pass on his hardened face as she aimed the RPG still left loaded in the Asset’s discarded rifle; courage failed her to actually aim the missile directly at the dark-haired assassin, even if he had been sent to kill _her_.

In the back of the S.H.I.E.L.D. detention vehicle, Natasha held her tongue, fearing that Steve would not believe her story or feel betrayed. It wouldn’t matter soon anyway. She, Falcon, and Cap were dead as soon as Brock Rumlow found a discreet enough place for an execution. More than Steve needed the truth, all they needed a miracle. At least her final act could be to taste, at last, the Soldier’s true name on her lips: _James_.

* * *

Maybe saving her planet once hadn’t been enough. Maybe Natasha needed to do it a second time. Twice for two souls. Hers. And _his_. All those little hints so long ago, the mere shadows of memory that would drift over the dark-haired man’s features, his little preferences and tastes she uncovered unwittingly when they were paired on missions...

Why was it, with all her years of taking small bits of intelligence and fitting them together, could she have not entertained that maybe, just maybe, ‘the American’ instructor of the Red Room was the missing-in-action hero of the Howling Commandos, Sergeant Barnes? Natasha had so many opportunities since she defected to put it all together. If she had just gone to the Smithsonian instead of dismissing Cap’s exhibit as nationalistic propaganda, she may have recognized the unique arcs of his mouth and eyes, the distinct dimple of his chin that her lips dusted and memorized years ago.

If. If. If.

So at Fury’s secret underground facility, at the end of the initial debrief, when Natasha was just about to go into the medical suite for the experimental treatment that would heal the through-and-through at her shoulder and prepare her for tomorrow’s op, she took Steve aside.

“After this all goes down...after we disable the helicarriers, I’ll go back for the Winter Soldier’s files in Ukraine. _Bucky’s_ files,” she clarified. Her gaze fell from his for a moment, feeling another wave of remorse. “If...if you want.” That the Asset had once been another Brooklyn boy with a playful nickname that had somehow followed him to adulthood was still, hours later, difficult for her to wrap her head around. Natasha had failed before to recover the Winter Soldier’s only known records. But maybe, with S.H.I.E.L.D. resources and HYDRA in chaos, she could find another way.

Steve smiled before her, in that expression that he sometimes gave. His features moving just a certain way when he was hiding his suffering, Natasha realized. When he was deathly sick with this or that illness, the scrawny scrap of a boy must have smiled like this at his mother Sarah and told her not to worry. Because he didn’t want anyone else to feel pain. Not over him. In this one fashion, she realized, he was a better liar than he knew.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” Cap responded, because he was taking the weight of the Winter Soldier’s revelation all on his own. Because she was too cowed to speak up and didn’t know where to begin. Damn her. “But it would be a great favor, Natasha.”

“Then we’d be even, Steven?” she asked, a lift of a single eyebrow, her own play on words masking her inner-conflict.

“How about we talk again in seventy-two?” Steve offered. They both knew that their small-but-expert team would either succeed in taking S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA down or they would be beyond favors and debts altogether and forever.

“Deal.”

* * *

Five minutes ago, Natasha witnessed Insight Helicarrier IN-01 make a devastating swipe at the Triskelion then clear the structure, angling towards the upper Potomac River in a spectacular fiery dive. Pierce was dead. Sam was safe in the helicopter with her. Steve was still missing.

Fury swept the river waters in the chopper, maneuvering both above and to the sides of the last massive, doomed battleship. The targeting bubble was shattered; acrid smoke and fire licked everywhere. Professional as everyone was, Natasha sensed their hearts sinking as it finally crashed.

Rogers. Where the hell was Rogers?!

Sam confirmed that the Winter Soldier had been on the final helicarrier when he lost visual of both him and Steve. Alexander Pierce, as dead as he was, would find the poetry in Captain America having a last, fatal dance with the assassin that was once his brother-in-arms, now HYDRA’s greatest achievement. Johann Schmitt would have gloated in triumph that anyone could be turned, twisted. Made to kill what they once loved. Anyone.

“Hill...try again. Just keep on trying,” Natasha called over the comms. “He’s out there somewhere!” She couldn’t believe that Steve had perished. Not him. He was too good; it should have been her instead.

And then in their ears, a transmission in only hisses and static. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots. Silence. Repeat.

“Hill, can you triangulate Cap’s signal with us?” Natasha radioed. “Rogers, come in?! Rogers, confirm status!”

The SOS repeated. Pause. Then the dots and dashes yet again.

Nick brought the helicopter to a standstill, the rotors beating the dark waters of the river below them into a froth.

The fifth time the signal came, Natasha was almost ready to break into tears. She swallowed it back. It wasn’t Steve that was transmitting on their channel, but it _was_ his device.

And on the other end? With ears everywhere in the Red Room, the newly-minted Black Widow and the Soldier learned communicate silently, clandestinely, when they needed. Natasha remembered -- just like the press of his articulated fingertips on her skin -- the particular pauses, the length of the dot-dot-dots and the quiet in-between. The signature was called a _’fist’_ to Morse code operators, and the irony of that was not lost on her.

“Hill here. I have a lock on Roger’s signal. Two point four-six clicks, up-river from HQ. Eastern bank.”

As soon as Maria finished her transmission, the SOS went silent. Natasha felt herself grow cold as Fury brought the helicopter around and headed north.

There were only two scenarios: the Winter Soldier was laying a trap, _or_ somehow, Steve had reached past the Asset’s conditioning, and he was in a subtle way aiding them. Natasha briefly debated with herself.

Pierce was dead; the Asset must know that through his own comm channel. Without a master, and no designee -- Rumlow? -- giving him direct mission orders, the man could certainly have enough presence of mind to signal to Captain America’s allies without confirming his own survival from the wreckage of three helicarriers and the Triskelion. HYDRA’s or not, Natasha knew the Winter Soldier was adept at hiding himself.

He could disappear again, unless she acted.

As Fury dropped the helicopter lower so they could scour the Potomac's shoreline for Rogers, Natasha radioed: “We’re coming to help you. Hang on. Stay with us. Everything will be fine. Just stay with us.” Her team would think she was trying to reach Steve. But, in truth, she was trying just as much to reach the one who tapped out the distress call.

“I see him!” Sam announced, and then he was diving from the chopper into the river thirty-feet below. Natasha reminded herself that Wilson was a trained pararescue; he was the most qualified to see to Steve’s injuries, stabilize him if needed, until more help arrived.

She spotted Steve, prone and unmoving on the edge of the water, Sam only yards away. Sam then with him, checking his friend’s vitals, calling for Hill to anonymously phone in to civilian 911 that Captain-Fucking-America, of all people, was in need of medical attention and transport to a hospital. Natasha was certain that Wilson would not leave Steve’s side until he was safe.

The assassin with the silvery arm was gone. Vanished like one of his monikers. _Prizrak._ Ghost. In the chaos, no one would likely thing to ask whether it could have been anyone other than Steve, semi-conscious, to have sent the distress signal.

Natasha bowed her head, felt the yearning and the despair return. By all mission parameters, their team of five had succeeded. Millions of lives saved. HYDRA’s ‘new world order’ disrupted. But there was little sense of victory for her, not with the Soldier to the wind.

She still owed Steve something.

“Nick,” she spoke into her headset. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s get Hill and go dark. Before the media and Armed Forces swarm this place like flies.”

But when they approached the Triskelion roof-top, Natasha sprang on Fury one more task.

“Give me ten minutes inside. Ten minutes, then leave me.”

“What the _fuck_ are you doing, Romanoff?!” Fury demanded over the headset. “The building could collapse.”

“You and I know that there are things that were never _on_ the network. Old things. SSR things.” She loaded a fresh magazine into her pistol and chambered a round, ready for any last remaining HYDRA resistance. “I need...if I don’t get those files now, they’re gone to who-knows-where.”

“Fine,” Fury grumbled over his headset. “Ten minutes, Agent. And you’ll need my clearance override.”

* * *

Four hours later, Nicholas J. Fury, presumed dead, and Natasha Romanoff, ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, were holed up in one of Natasha’s safe-houses, a cabin with a private dock deep within an unremarkable cove far into Chesapeake Bay. On a couple of laptops, they began running data analysis on the chips she pulled from Jasper Sitwell’s and Alexander Pierce’s cellphones, cross-referencing it with other known HYDRA cronies. Maria Hill was laying low for now. Sam had called in favors with the Veterans Administration and now was supervising Steve’s recovery under armed guard.

Stripped of his rank and his eyepatch, Nick seemed more to her like an old grand-uncle. A very capable, deadly grand-uncle, but still more mellow now that he wasn’t running the day-to-day operations of a massive, highly financed, intelligence organization.

Next to the laptops running the computations sat a plain cardboard box with a dozen old files that went all the way back to the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Wartime intelligence.

One of these folders originated from a HYDRA facility supervised by one of the Red Skull’s head lackies and contained mentions of locations and operations of secret experimental labs in Europe and the Mediterranean. But before the SSR could move on it, the Allies’ victory was declared.

The proto-S.H.I.E.L.D. leadership thought simply to bury the intel rather than violate international accords that left much of Eastern Europe to Soviet oversight. With Johann Schmitt dead, HYDRA’s resources were drying up. A few years later, the ‘rehabilitated’ Dr. Arnim Zola offered to assist with Operation Paperclip and the recruitment of HYDRA’s remaining top scientists. The cost in political stability and lives of agents made further missions behind the Iron Curtain untenable. Everyone was thirsty for peace.

So the file sat in a vault, aging and yellowing and, after a decade or so, forgotten except as legacy. And at the very end, Natasha retrieved it with a few others. With Fury’s reluctant consent, she would use it as a bargaining chip for another old file that interested her much, much more.

Before he left the cabin a half-day later, Nick and she made plans to visit his graveside in a few weeks for a final regroup.

“I’d like to see if Rogers and Wilson are up for the squid hunt, so could you keep tabs on them? Figure out how to slide them the rendezvous info?” he asked, slipping back on his sunglasses as he readied himself and his gear by the cabin’s screen door.

“Sure,” Natasha agreed, already three coffees ahead and a plan half-formed involving a book she never managed to finish and something from a vending machine. But that wasn’t in the front of her mind just now. She had one last question for her former boss.

“Hey, Nick?” she inquired. “If...if I had agreed to the psych evaluation, when Clint brought me in, would things have been different? Would you have trusted me?”

“Having everyone triple and quadruple guess you was just what we needed sometimes,” the not-quite-Director answered. “I think the term ‘skeleton key’ applies. The circumspection surrounding your loyalty allowed me to slip you through certain doors. HYDRA didn’t expect you to help Cap, given your track-record. Pierce may have thought he had an upper-hand on you; but really, few ever have. Only problem is, Natasha, skeletons come with closets.” Nick tugged the hood over his bald head. “Maybe now that you have some time and some means, you’ll air out whatever else is stashed in there with you that never made it to your dossier.”

There were still one or two trusted S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the field, and Nick divulged his intent to track them down. With a pack over his shoulder, a case in his hand, and a few devices in his pockets, the one-eyed man walked away from her and towards the shore.

* * *

The next day, donning a disguise, Natasha slipped into the great American museum she had pointedly ignored since Clint first brought her to the States. The Smithsonian. She treated it like a stakeout, looking for plain-clothes authorities that would seek to arrest her or more. Finally, after an hour and a half of patient meandering and subtle casing, she walked into the corridors dedicated to the living embodiment of freedom: Captain America.

Her ears will filled with speculation by curious patrons of what really happened on the Potomac, being called by the media: ‘The Triskelion Disaster.’

Soon the official inquiries would start. Soon the authorities would demand answers from those deemed responsible. But today, she was still anonymous.

Most everyone that toured the tribute focused their attention on the blond Man-of-Action at the front, eyes drawn easily to his patriotic uniform and forthright manner. But not Natasha. She looked just behind, or just to the left, and found on murals and displays and footage the dark-haired man that watched Steve’s back for far longer than she ever had.

The distant past and the near present came crashing together, and Natasha had to bow her head more than once rather than let strangers see how stricken she was to witness James whole; before his tragic fall, before cruel and ambitious monsters stripped his mind down and gave him a metal appendage in return. How easily the handsome Sergeant Barnes smiled, how relaxed he seemed in his own skin. The grace was there in him, yes, and the steel-eyed focus when he needed. But he hadn’t yet been hardened into a living, brutal weapon.

Nothing at the exhibit mentioned how much of a charmer he was, how at ease with women; but Natasha knew. The KGB and HYDRA wanted a perfect soldier; they hadn’t bothered trying to refashion who he was as a lover. That part of James was dismissed, an unimportant human weakness. The masters never knew how very wrong they were, how much of his core identity was not about killing at all...

* * *

Sitwell’s cellphone had quietly recorded a number of locations, coordinates embedded in with other data. From it, Natasha extrapolated a couple of HYDRA safe-houses on the east coast; places where the squids likely fled to regroup when the helicarriers fell from the sky and Pierce was presumed dead.

After staking out the HYDRA goons, she had her sights on one particular woman near to Natasha’s own build. Getting a good voice sample proved the most time-consuming. But after she did, the Black Widow was ruthless, executing each and every one of them, armed and resisting or not. S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols on enemy engagement meant nothing now, and she emptied herself of everything but her concentration and cold vengeance. Alone and unsupported, she had no time for prisoners, no time for mercy, not even for interrogation. It was rough justice for everything HYDRA had done seven decades ago in taking a young man with a clever mind and a protective instinct and twisting him into their instrument, and she had no remorse.

Thirty minutes later, driving away from the carnage, Natasha powered up a burner phone for one very important call.

“Hey, Pepper. It’s Nat.”

Potts was frantic. _“Natasha! Oh my god! What’s going on?! It’s all over the news, about S.H.I.E.L.D., and Fury’s death and no one seems to have any answers.”_ And because Pepper was Pepper: _“Are you alright?! Is Steve?”_

“Yeah. He’s okay. I’m okay. Listen, I can’t stay on this call for long. I need a favor, a big favor. Like payback-for-the-Justin-Hammer-thing favor.”

_”What is it?”_

”I need an private jet to Ukraine. I need to get there quietly. By tonight. Before the Feds get their act together.”

_”Natasha...are you...are you in trouble? Real trouble?”_

“I can’t explain without compromising you further. It’s something for Rogers.” And for her. “My window’s short. Please. I don’t have many other options. I promise that when a U.S. Marshal comes to my Washington flat with a subpoena, I’ll be back in the States for whatever witch-trial they want to conduct. I _need_ that jet, Pepper.”

_”Alright. Just tell me where to send the plane. I’ll make the calls. I’ll...hmm...you’ll be counsel for a subcontractor Stark Industries is courting in Eastern Europe. Sound good?”_

“Perfect. Name on the passport is Alexa Shapiro.”

* * *

Pepper Potts always saw to the details. The jet that was readied for Ms. Shapiro had a small but private berth with a real bed to give Natasha the first true opportunity at a full night’s sleep she had in a week. Living on coffee and S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued stims for days on end had left her a little ragged at the edges. So at thirty-five thousand feet, Natasha gratefully silenced the engine noise with earplugs and slipped into the cool Egyptian cotton sheets for six or seven uninterrupted hours of oblivion.

Often after an op, her slumber was deep, dark, and dreamless. But six miles closer to the stars, and her mind fresh with images and sounds captured on black-and-white film and photographs, she was quite easily ushered into a chimerical scenario where her part would unfold in its own fanciful way.

_The tones of live music is what first drew her down a half-lit corridor, the rhythmic snares and blaring horns setting a jivy, foot-tapping tempo. Cigarette and cigar smoke then wafted into her nose. Some sort of dance or function hall, she guessed. She was dressed up in a vintage black gown, rhinestones sparking on the low-cut neckline. Natasha’s spy-self remembered that the first thing she needed to discover, before exploring any further, were the exits: windows or doors, didn’t matter. But no direction or way was marked._

_She pivoted, turning away from source of the music, and her hand drifted to the first doorknob she found. She twisted it, pulling it open only to find it being pushed hastily from the other side simultaneously by a dark-haired male figure. Both of them caught off-balance, he careened into her, a blur of drab-green and polished brass._

_“Whoa there!” was his warning as their momentum was halted by the unyielding surface behind her. The man did his best backpedal and throw up his hands to catch himself but it was too late; his body slammed her against dark wood paneling and she was momentarily pinned against his chest._

_Accident though it seemed, Natasha’s instinct was to counter with a debilitating kick to her assailant’s right knee, followed swiftly by an elbow to the base of his neck, forcing her attacker to the floor. But his eyes caught hers and, even in the backlight, the outline of his features were all-too-familiar. She froze instead._

_A swear was on Sergeant Barnes’ next breath before he quelled it. Over his shoulder and through the doorway, men similarly attired in military uniforms were rising from their seats at an improvised card table. They were all looking rather irate, like they had just been cleaned out and the winner had too quickly excused himself from playing further hands._

_While she was still stiff and wordless, Bucky seemed entirely in his element. He bent his lips to her ear, a quiet, whispering plea and a cocky, reckless invitation all-at-once. “I hate to ask a stranger this, but...Um...Help?!” She was close enough to catch the warm scent of his aftershave, and the novel discovery of it made her head swim with fresh longing. But the Sergeant wanted her aid, and she forced herself to focus as if this was a mission._

_Natasha pushed him a half-step away from her, summoning indignancy. “Where the_ fuck _have you been?! Gambling? I’ve been waiting for you at the bar for more than an hour!” she accused. Her then hands fell to his dress jacket and she grabbed his lapels, her eyes cast balefully over Buck’s shoulder to the men suddenly more curious than angry, crowded in the doorway. She gave her co-conspirator a wink only he could see._

_Well-bred women of his era didn’t swear like sailors. The men in the back room all laughed nervously at her foul mouth. “Looks like you got a firecracker there, soldier!” came from one of the more mellow of the card players._

_“Darlin’, I’m so very sorry,” Bucky apologized sweetly, seeming perfectly content at the charade. His hands drifted down to her hips. “Time got away from me. With the train back to the Big Apple leaving in the mornin’, a fella’s gotta live it up tonight, right?”_

_“Bastard,” Natasha insulted fondly, then she crushed her lips to his; the young man’s surprised, rigid reception melted when his taste of whiskey mingled with her breath of cinnamon. The onlookers whooped and howled in approval as their kiss lingered and went far beyond decent._

_“Lucky in cards_ and _women, aren’t you, Barnes?” one of his cooler opponents quipped to his back, unwilling to let the incident she had barged in on go. “Do you cheat at both or just one?”_

_It was an expertly aimed aspersion, to accuse the man of no honor at the gaming table or with his affections. She felt Buck tense as he withdrew his mouth from hers, readying himself for a brawl. He wasn’t an expert killer, not yet, but Natasha knew he’d get in more of his fair share of licks. And together…? Well, she didn’t want this dream to end in bruises and broken bones and a pile of semi-conscious servicemen._

_Natasha slid her hands from her psuedo-beau’s chest upwards, framing his jaw and keeping his attention squared on her. She shook her head subtly, then suggested, “Come dance with me, Sarge. They’re playing our song.”_

_Buck studied her, his brow furrowing. His gaze fluttered across her face and back to her mouth; then the slate-blue stare stilling as he made his choice of either fighting with the boys or fleeing with the girl. From his pant’s pocket, his long fingers extracted a good deal of his winnings. He then tossed the crumpled bills over his shoulder. His eyes never deviated from hers, even though his next words were directed to the audience behind. “How ‘bout you dead hoofers have a few more drinks on me?” he offered, Brooklyn accent laid on thick. “I have a date.”_

_Natasha smiled softly as the Sergeant rested his left hand, heated and strong, to the small of her back. When he guided her towards the strains of the band music, her heart felt light, lighter than it had been in years._

_“So, Red,” he drawled, easily. “What else can I call you by?”_

The palm that touched her shoulder was not her dance partner’s, but the flight attendant, waking Natasha. The jet would be touching down shortly. She pulled out her earplugs, sighed, and tasted the grief. If her imagination conjured anything close to who the original Bucky Barnes had been, no wonder Cap was so wrecked by the Soldier that bore his best friend’s face but so little of his character.

* * *

Olympia Fisher had worked in the Hub for eight years as an equipment inventory analyst, which was a fancy way of saying she was in charge of knowing which tech and what weapons were assigned to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s field agents. After the Triskelion, the Hub itself fell into chaos, and Olympia, who would rather survive than be one of HYDRA’s martyrs, grabbed what she could from the vaults and _ran_. It had been tricky getting across several international borders, but she had managed it with enough bribes.

And now Olympia sat across from a nameless representative of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in a windowless back room, Natasha having called in a favor from her contact in the government for a meet-up.

The round-headed man with round-glasses inquired, “Are you here to represent S.H.I.E.L.D., Ms. Fisher? Because our friends in the intelligence community are quite certain that your organization is gasping its last breath.”

“Are you asking to renegotiate your compensation, for keeping an eye on those files like S.H.I.E.L.D. asked?” Olympia inquired. Maybe, just maybe she’d hook something with the question.

“Agent Garrett was quite accommodating. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been picking up our calls. And so you are here? In his stead?”

 _Garrett?!_ Her mouth dried. John Garrett was HYDRA. The infiltration ran deep. And she had no way of warning anyone, because the dead-drop she had just set up with Nick was an ocean away and Maria Hill was also unreachable.

“I’m only here for myself,” Olympia corrected, showing none of the frustration Natasha felt at that moment. “Because, you are right. S.H.I.E.L.D. is sunk. And when it’s every man for himself, a few are smart enough to find a life preserver.”

“And is that what you are doing, Ms. Fisher? Coming to us to provide you protection? For what?!,” the man mocked. “All of the intel you could have offered is now free to any simpleton with a smartphone.”

“There are S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets that were never digitized and never put on any network. I happen to have information on a number locations of secret Nazi laboratories, here in Ukraine, Belarus too. Facilities in use at the Great Patriotic War and then abandoned before the SSR ever got a good peek at what was inside.”

“What value is there in seventy-year old science?” came the rebuttal.

“They say that some of Howard Stark’s greatest inventions happened during the War. Even versions of the serum that created Captain America. Imagine finding something like _that_ ,” she enticed, leaning in a little over the table between them.

“It is not in my job description, Miss, to _imagine._ ” The condescending tone was thick.

“Then imagine this,” she volleyed. “Imagine me negotiating with the Russians instead. One of these locations happens to be on the Crimean peninsula. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt, in your talks with the Russian Federation, to have that as a carrot.” Olympia let the words sink in for a moment. “I’m not asking for protection. I am asking for a few KGB files you kept safe for us. Winter Soldier.” Something else occurred to her. “And whatever else may be filed under the last name of ‘Barnes’. James Buchanan Barnes.” It was a devil’s bargain, in a way. Pray that there was enough useful tech left in those places to be promising, but not enough to put other’s lives at risk until she could do damage-control later.

Olympia took out a pen and a pad of paper from the front pocket of her business suit. “Here are the coordinates for one facility in the Chernivtsi province. The Carpathian mountains, I believe. Have your personnel check it out. Think of it like an archaeological site; you never know what treasures you may dig up.” As she scrawled, she continued. “The Ministry or whomever else you are bringing onboard has sixteen hours to arrange the exchange with me, or I’ll find other parties interested in the bargain.”

The man reached for the paper. “And what is your interest in the Winter Soldier, Ms. Fisher? Old colleagues tell me the Asset has been out of Russian hands for many years now, and that he is likely dead.”

“Speculative,” she answered. “Purely speculative.”

* * *

After eluding a number of plainclothes Ukrainian operatives intent on trailing her, Natasha slipped off the photostatic veil that she had kept since the Triskelion. It was still a tech unknown to most in the ‘trade’, and Natasha had to be rather delicate with it, unless it develop shorts and fissures. Certainly HYDRA had their hands on at least a few themselves.

Thirteen hours later, under the cover of darkness, the Black Widow talked to the Ukrainian official on a cellphone, staring down on his goon through her rifle scope from a high window nearby to her designated exchange location.

“I need your man to show me the files. Have him pull them out and text me the cover and something from the twenty-second page of each folder. When I have verified them, I’ll tell you where my package for you is hidden.” While she waited for the images to go through to her burner, she declared: “I know you have other operatives on the perimeter, looking for me. But really, I just want us to do a favor for one another, establish a little trust. I’m a free agent, now that my employer is six feet under. I would make a better friend than enemy, let me assure you.”

Two hours after she had a James Barnes’ KGB dossier in her hands, she was back on the Stark Industries jet to the States. She hadn’t opened it -- _couldn’t_ open it-- until she was quite alone and prepared to lose days in its revelations.

“Does the crew still keep the Van Winkle bourbon stocked? I recall it being one of Mr. Stark’s favorites,” she inquired of the flight attendant.

“Certainly, Ms. Shapiro. How would you like it served?”

“Neat,” Natasha answered.

And when the tumbler arrived, the amber liquid winking at her in its glass, Natasha raised it for a quiet toast: “To waking up after years of sleep, gentlemen.”

* * *

When Natasha returned to her on-the-books/public-record residence in D.C., she was greeted by a few reporters who had been sitting on the place for a few days, hoping to get lucky when the scarlet-haired woman finally showed up to collect her mail.

She hated cameras more than she hated being grilled by investigators, because then thousands of regular people would have that ‘do I know you from somewhere?’ pause whenever she showed up anywhere in public. A spy wanted to be anonymous or at least low-profile. Where the press was clever enough to find her, there would be the CIA, NSA, or FBI as well. She was pretty certain there was one case-car already parked a little down the street.

Whatever. She had invited this, in a way. If she let more people figure out who Natasha Romanoff was, they could better predict her. When they could predict her, they might just be able to trust her. She blamed Steve, at first, for that old ache at wanting to be _known_ again, but it had not-so-much to do with him and most-everything to do with a Red Room agent named Natalia and a man with a cybernetic arm called simply by his masters _’Soldat.’_

She spent the first four hours of her ‘home’ sweeping it for bugs.

“Hey, guys!” she flirted with the cameras. “I know you have a lot of jurisdiction now, but really, if you need to learn stuff from me that you can’t find on the ‘net, just get a warrant or a subpoena like you should.” Before she disabled them all, she set a tablet to loop an earworm about narwhals directly in front of the kitchen cam and put a vibrator in a shoebox against the audio bug in her bedroom. Let them deal with _that_ for twenty-four hours. She had earplugs.

Natasha hadn’t risked bringing the Kiev folder here. She just had to wait and wait some more, until the authorities decided what to make of her and what to do with her.

Because the Feds were probably monitoring her internet traffic too, she did things like download sudoku puzzles (was it a code?) and watch all three seasons of ‘House of Cards,’ but in random order (was it a signal?!). She played with them, probably annoyed them, but in the end, no one barged down her door or shot her at her through her living room windows.

The U.S. Marshal that finally came to her door was a polite, petite young woman with a badge. She handed over the documents right in the front entrance of Natasha’s building, in the full company of the press. That’s when Natasha finally called the lawyer Pepper had kindly arranged for her mid-air on her return trip to the States.

* * *

For a few weeks, Barnes’ KGB file was a myth, a rumor. To be believed or not as the faithful chose. Like the promise of summer in the heart of a Russian winter. It was collected by one enterprising HYDRA covert agent by the name of Olympia Fisher, and then lost when Olympia Fisher died for the second time.

This was how Natasha was the greatest liar that S.H.I.E.L.D. ever had. Because faith was truth to some and lies to others, and if she _focused_ in just the correct way, a concept or memory could be falsehood or fact, however she framed her own mind. It was mastery. It was surrender. It was the gift that left her adrift in her own shell-of-a-self for a time.

She ate when she was hungry, slept when she was tired, and let the rest be routine until the day a woman named Natasha Romanoff put her hand on another version of truth in the form of a bible. She swore to retell it, whole and nothing but that, before God and a Congressional subcommittee convened to decide what to do with the science-fiction story of aliens and mad-genius scientists and super-soldiers and shadowy organizations that could not be understood, much less _controlled._

In the end, Agent Romanoff of S.H.I.E.L.D. appealed to trust, not fact. That when her world needed people like her and Captain Rogers and Sam Wilson to defend it, they could be counted on. If, and only if, they were free. She would not be _any_ authority’s or regime’s puppet or captive. Never again. And if it ever came down to it, she would fight down to her very eye-teeth and the quick of her nails to assure the Winter Soldier wouldn’t be one either.

* * *

When the hearings finally wrapped up, Natasha rented a motorcycle for the weekend and rode out west to the Blue Ridge mountains. Hugging the curves of ridgeline roads like an old friend, Natasha felt the miles and the wind scour away the hours-upon-hours of accusations and inquiries. The lawyers that Pepper arranged prepared her well. Still, she was deemed ‘mouthy’ by certain committee members, probably because they couldn’t call her worse on national television. It was done now. Done until another world-threat arose...

In 1958, the Hope Diamond was delivered to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History via regular, first class post. The package was so unremarkable as to not attract attention. So Natasha, upon disembarking from Stark’s loaned jet, sent a box to a small motel in a small town that was less than two miles from the Appalachian Trail that snaked roughly from north to south through the Virginia mountains. Hikers stopped there to pick up supplies that friends mailed to them along the route. Packages could sit for weeks without suspicion. Trial-names were aliases of sorts, and if someone used a trail-name at the pick-up, the attendant behind the desk didn’t question it much. So ‘Arachne’ picked up the box filled with her backpacking gear, mailed from New York City.

Inside the room she rented for the night, Natasha turned the TV up loud, to some stupid syndicated show with a laugh-track.

Slipped within her pack was a manilla envelope. Inside that manilla envelope was a certain folder, handwritten Cyrillic designating it as the ‘record of maintenance, deployment, and experimentation’ of James Barnes. ‘Maintenance,’ as if he were a machine, a _thing_ that needed to be repaired when he malfunctioned. She set it on the bed beside her, and stared at the cover for an agonizing few minutes.

Not yet, not yet. Did she really want answers? Would all the knowledge in the world about what they had done to him have ever made a difference in the Red Room? Would it bring back to life all those people that the Winter Soldier was sent to kill for decades and decades?

Throwing herself on her back, Natasha’s fingers drifted to her waistband, swept over the scar from Odessa like a trembling caress.

Before it hit, she twisted fast, throwing her face into the pillows. The savage and feral scream of a wounded animal issued from her throat, the cacophony of a thousand memories she had pushed deep into the shadows of her skull until they were almost forgotten. Sobs squeezed her lungs, set her diaphragm to aching with the force of them.

She had held it together when she believed Fury dead. She held it together when the Winter Soldier was given _her_ to eradicate after Sitwell on the DC overpass. She even held it together as Steve was trying to piece together just how Bucky had survived his fall into an icy ravine. Natasha couldn’t hold it together any longer.

When some coherent thought came back to her an hour or so later, Natasha found her snot and tears smeared across the rented pillowcase. She trudged to the bathroom, washed her splotched and reddened face with cool water.

Old wounds indulged, impotency flushed from hiding, Natasha dug out the bottle of rye whiskey she had stashed in the cycle’s side case for her trip. The dull ache of sorrow was a fine enough drinking companion.

After a deep initial pull of the amber liquor, Natasha held her breath and flipped open the folder to its first records.

She was greeted by a picture of the Winter Soldier, suspended and still in his cryochamber, and a smaller, sepia-toned photo of Sergeant Barnes in his dress uniform with his hat cocked rather playfully to the side and the start of a grin on his lips. It was a candid, and when Natasha flipped it over, it read “World Expo - June 1943.” Someone had been spying on Howard Stark, the U.S. Recruitment facility at the Expo, or servicemen that came close to Dr. Erskine; likely all three. HYDRA bastards.

Next was transcripts of interviews of the Russian unit that recovered Barnes from a high alpine stream. At first, they believed him dead: his skin white, lips blue, undetectable pulse. But then, someone noticed his torn left arm still sluggishly bleeding a fresh red hue. Water forced out of his lungs, fading in an out of consciousness, they carried him to their camp. While a medic treated him for blood-loss and hypothermia, the Russian scouts radioed their find to their superiors. The American soldier was to be transported as soon as possible to a Russian field hospital.

Red Army medical notes came after that, of his initial assessment and treatment. Doctors went on record that they had never seen such resilience in a patient. They kept the American sedated but it took four times the usual dosage for it to have proper effect. Before the field doctors had come to a conclusion about whether to perform a full amputation, the man was claimed by the Osnaz special forces. The Red Army records ended.

Then the KGB records began. The trauma to the American’s left arm was cleaned up, and whatever of his appendage could be saved in an amputation was preserved to the best of their surgeon’s ability. Almost. Medical researchers requested blood, tissue, and samples of his bodily fluids for further study. The American suffered from amnesia. At first, the white-coats assumed his memory loss was from the painkillers. So they took their patient off of them only twelve hours after his surgery in order to properly interrogate him.

A transcript. _What was his name?_ He couldn’t answer. (They had seized his dog-tags from him upon his initial rescue, but told him they were lost.) _What was his mission?_ He couldn’t recall. _Was he alone? How many men were in his unit?_ He didn’t know, but please, could they give him something to numb his wound? He couldn’t concentrate on their questions, the agony his stump was giving him. His pleading became less and less coherent with each question posed to him. The interrogation ended only when Barnes blacked out from his pain and exhaustion. That’s when they decided to bring in a _’specialist.’_

Shivering in cold rage, Natasha closed the file. She had enough for one night.

* * *

_ _

_This hallway was sterile and clinically lit. Natasha found herself carrying a stainless-steel tray: a meal of borscht, rye bread, and a cup of steaming, sweetened black tea. She wore a pressed white apron, her hair coiffed neatly back from her face._

_A patrolling guard passed her with a curt nod, like he recognized her. She stopped at a metal door with a small window. With the key her hand felt in her apron pocket, she balance the tray and admitted herself into the room. Her heart pounded a little in anticipation, fully aware of who she would find there. The door swung behind her automatically, locking herself in with him._

_Bucky, or what remained of him, lay inclined on two pillows at his back, eyes half-closed, his head turned away from the door. His complexion was waxy, the flesh around his eyes sunken, a fever-sheen on his brow. They hadn’t shaved him and his stubble was almost black against his pallor. Shirtless, the reconstructed and stapled stump of his left arm was wrapped generously in gauze. The misery was thick upon him, and his natural vigour seemed almost all snuffed out, which made Natasha almost moan in sympathy._

_He didn’t seem to care to engage her, just stare into oblivion. It was a better option, she thought, then staring at the portrait of Stalin on the other bare wall. There was a chrome cart on wheels next to the bed, and Natasha set down the soldier’s meal._

_“I am here to change your bandage and offer you food,” she spoke softly, in accented English. “Help you become strong again.”_

_Her feminine voice must have surprised him. His dark-lashed eyes fluttered fully open, and he twisted around to face her, his good hand grasping and tugging at his sheets to cover his stub of a limb, as if he was embarrassed by it; even though such a sudden motion made his lips tighten and twist in pain._

_“No needles? No samples?” he asked, his voice layered with accusations, anticipation of more tortures guised as medical procedures. “And no questions?”_

_“None of that,” she soothed, closing the space between her and his bedside. “Not from me.”_

_He studied her face, looking for something to trust. “When do I get to go home?” he inquired, his eyes suddenly revealing his fright, confusion, and desperation._

_She found her hand clenching into his mattress. Natasha could try to tell him the horrible truth, but it wouldn’t matter. Because, dimly, she was aware this had already come to pass. “You’re not finished here yet. I’m so sorry. I’m here for a little while to...try to make things a little better. A little less painful.” For them both._

_“Did you bring morphine?” he inquired. “I know you said no needles, but I’d…please...my arm hurts so bad.”_

_“The white-coats here are worried that your memories won’t return with sedatives and narcotics in you,” she explained. “And the military men want their intel.”_

_He swallowed, turning his head to gaze up at the featureless ceiling, hopeless. “Then what_ can _you offer me?” he half choked, his voice laden with grief and challenge._

_“Some warm stew for your stomach,” she responded, finding a stool in the corner and pulling it up to the left-hand side of the bed. She perched on it gracefully. “And my company.”_

_He tried to laugh, a bitter chuckle, but it came out as a racking cough instead. When he could speak again, he remarked, “I think you may just be the_ last _female companionship I’ll have without paying for the pleasure.”_

_Natasha’s own throat seized. He was being so, so cruel to himself. Bucky Barnes had taken pride in his physicality, his looks, the confidence that charmed onlookers. Even without his memories, he still despaired at the idea of being a cripple, another war-time amputee that a dame would never think to choose above those men sound and whole of body._

_“That’s not true,” she countered, reaching to brush her fingertips to the knuckles of the one hand remaining to him. “There will be a woman, one day...”_

_The soldier finally turned his head and gazed at her, quietly inquiring. “Will she be anything like you?” He asked her like a sickly boy willing to listen to a fairytale. Perhaps the promise of it distracted him from his aches and uncertainty._

_“In many, many ways.” Natasha took the risk and leant over further to lace her free fingers through his hair, a tad oily from lack of wash and trimmed shorter than she ever felt, but just as mink-soft. “She’ll be a bit of a pill, though, at the start. So you’ll have to put up with that.”_

_“I’ll try,” he murmured._

_Whether because of her caresses or her light banter, a ghost of a smile passed over the soldier’s lips. He closed his eyes, turned on his side towards her, then nuzzled his nose into his bedding; a suffering creature warming himself in the small comfort of the sun. How long they stayed like that, Natasha could not tell. There were no clocks in this room. No windows._

_Another key made a sound in the door’s lock, and now three men entered the room: one doctor, one guard, and a bald man somewhere in his sixties dressed in a tweed suit with a keen intelligence in his eyes. Natasha immediately withdrew her touch and sat up, just as the soldier rolled onto his back and froze._

_The doctor inquired of her in Russian, his eyes scanning over the rigid, wary man in the bed, “Has he eaten?”_

_“No, doctor,” she answered, like a good nurse. “He refused the food. But he did ask for more morphine.”_

_The man in the suit walked slowly to the soldier’s feet. “You are in a great deal of pain,_ soldat?,” _he asked in English, a lilt in his voice._

_The patient flicked his gaze downward and swallowed, holding back an answer, choosing to appear stoic._

_“I can only help you if you first admit to the pain. Like have helped so many of your brothers-in-arms, their limbs taken by mortars or grenades on the battlefield,” he explained, patient, reasonable. “So I ask again. Are you suffering, young man?”_

_Natasha witnessed a single tear leak from the corner of Bucky’s eye as he whispered, “Yes.” Her own eyes stung, knowing that this was just the very, very beginning of his trials._

_“Then I will show you how to escape it. Your pain is only in the mind. It can be overcome if you learn, with me, how to focus beyond all your troubles,” the specialist, one Dr. Johann Fennhoff, promised with a fatherly, caring voice._

_Turning to the medical doctor in the room and flicking his gaze also to Natasha, Fennhoff took a pen and notebook out of his pocket. “I need to be alone with him. We have much work to do, no?”_

_Natasha did not want to leave at all. “Can’t I…? Perhaps we can get him to take a few spoonfuls of the borscht? Sip some tea?” She turned back to the tray, feeling how cold the soup had turned._

_“Your concern is very telling, my dear,” Fennhoff remarked, and Natasha understood a fraction of a moment too late that she had been made. A grandmaster at his craft._

_She attempted to toss the bowl of stewed beets and potatoes into the guard’s face as she pivoted, but her reaction time was too slow. The force of the baton on the base of her skull blinded her with a white agony of its own, jarring her out of the dreamscape and into sudden wakefulness.  
_

* * *

Natasha has dealt with nightmares again and again in her life. No one could go through what she went through and not have them. There was a saying she had run across, once: _no one came back from a war unwounded._ With every decade, the way war was waged changed. The justifications changed, fronts changed, the weapons changed. The fragility of the human condition did not.

The Black Widow was trained as a spy more than a soldier. She often knew the names of those she crossed off; with some, she even knew the taste and scent of them. That left scars of a different kind entire. Voices and visages of the dead haunted her, sometimes even in the waking moments, too. The Winter Soldier had done his best to teach her that what she did by the directives of her superiors could not be held over her; but when her own hands were sticky with blood, or she drew the last choking breath against her garrotte, she gained another tormenting shade none-the-less.

Natasha had developed quite a repertoire for exorcising them over the years. Perhaps the most sane of the methods was to spend time in wild places, where the machinations of humankind and their artifacts were almost absent. Mountains and streams and trees bore her neither lust nor contempt.

On a payphone outside her motel, she called into Sam. Rogers had made a full recovery, and thanked her for the thoughtful gift. Alright. That was code-speak for ‘we got your message about when to meet up with Fury.’ It was a short conversation. She wasn’t sure who may be listening in. Trying to contact Clint would have to wait; even if he was in some cave in Afghanistan, he had probably gotten word of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s demise by now.

She hiked all that day, pausing every few hours to snack, rest, and open Barnes’s file, again and again, to the naked sky. In the dappled shade of an improvised, off-trail retreat, Natasha read more of the reports.

Uncertain of what to do with their miraculous captive, who was growing less and less cooperative in the (unexplained) absence of Dr. Fennhoff, the Russians elected to ‘preserve’ him in a cryochamber mimicking the frigid conditions of his discovery.

A few years went by. There was a record of a technician that would monitor Barnes in his statis, week by week, but except for drawing more blood or tissue samples from his veins and organs for study, he was largely ignored. Then a scientist designated only as ‘Ж’ was named a key contributor to a new initiative: Project Winter Soldier. Ж ordered Barnes to be brought out of his cold suspension. Ж supervised the fitting of the Soldier with a bionic arm. Ж administered experimental treatments designed to improve his strength and reflexes further. The taste of static in her mouth, the flash of a spectacled face on a monochrome green monitor, told Natasha exactly who Ж was. Fuck Zola.

And Barnes’ amnesia? What was frustrating to the KGB interrogators when he was first captured became valuable in his initially brainwashing.

_...Subject responds well to hypnotic suggestions that the Great Patriotic War has brought every nation into extended conflict. ...Subject willing to undergo special forces training to said cause of restoring global peace. ...In semi-lucid states, subject displays approval-seeking tendencies with male authority figures, ages ranging from mid-forties to late sixties…_

The next few hours of a vigorous pace on the white-blazed path burned off most of her anger. Natasha contemplated how Steve would react. He’d probably need another fifteen punching bags and months of psychotherapy after reading the notes of the Asset’s ‘recruitment’ and initial ‘conditioning’.

She contemplated finally coming clean to Rogers, of putting her hope in him that he would actually, honestly _believe_ her confession. That she had never been made privy to Barnes’ name or his identity. That whatever had gone on between her and the remnants and echoes of James left within the Winter Soldier had _not_ been seduction to keep him loyal to the Russian cause. That their intimacy had been the root of her defection, the shelter of kindness and human connection in a place where emotions were only to be exploited. But she couldn’t be certain of the truth. Memory and motivations were a fickle thing in the operatives of the Red Room, and she had done her share of repression.

Natasha thought once again about finally letting the dam break on her silence as soon as she got back to DC, but then remembered Steve’s tongue-lashing at Fury when he claimed he didn’t know about Barnes: “Even if you had, would you have told me? Or would you have compartmentalized that too?” She and Steve had just...The truth would lay to waste whatever trust she had built with him. And if the Avengers were ever needed again? He couldn’t be second guessing her; they needed to be able to count on each other.

When Natasha’s trail crossed a local asphalt road, she dug out her cellphone from the hip-pocket of her pack and dialed into the motel she was staying at, asking for the shuttle service (which was basically piling into the back of a run-down minivan).

The interesting thing about the trail was the easy camaraderie with other hikers sharing the same chosen experience. No one came to this place by accident. So while Natasha was cat-napping with her head on her pack, waiting for her ride back to the small town where she was staying, she heard the crunch of footsteps come off the trail in the opposite direction and slow.

“Hey,” a male voice greeted above her. “Do you know whether this is 608 or 606?”

Natasha cracked her eyes open and homed in on her companion, a blond young man in his early twenties. By his scruffy look and gear, he had been on the trail for weeks if not months.

“606,” she answered, lazily. “If you talk with my driver, you may be able to throw her a five and get a trip into town.”

“Thanks. I think I might.” He didn’t move. “Are you...do I know you…?”

She sighed softly. It was instinct to lie, but she was in a truthful mood. Maybe it was because the hiker looked a bit like Steve. “Were you watching the television a week ago? About DC and the helicarrier crash and the infiltration of the U.S. Government by an organization with Nazi origins?”

“Well, I had this toe infection and had to spend like three or four zero-days --” The man suddenly paused. “Oh, shit! You’re Natasha Romanoff.”

‘Yep,” she agreed, closing her eyes again.

He chuckled nervously. “I guess there isn’t many places to go, with what went down, for some quiet. ‘Cept for the AT that is.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“On the trail, I go by Skeeter.”

She decided she liked the guy. “If you come into town, Skeeter, I’ll treat you to dinner. There’s a steakhouse and a DQ.” Most long-distance hikers got food cravings for burgers, ice cream, and fresh veggies after a while. Generosity like this was called ‘trail magic’ and she may as well give her share of it. “If you just call me ‘Nat’.”

“Like the little annoying insect that bugs Congress and the Pentagon and they can’t seem to swat? That kind of ‘Gnat?’”

Natasha found herself suddenly laughing, the first real belly-laugh she had had in weeks. It wasn’t so bad, always, to be known.

“Exactly that kind.”

* * *

Many dreams were patchworks of daily experiences, fleeting impressions, and currents of emotions. But some were almost purely memory.

_She entered the front door of the flat-turned-safehouse, sensing it was close to three or four in the morning. It was raining that night, in whatever European city this was. She could smell it in the air and witness it in droplets that clung to her short sable wig she saw in a hallway mirror. Dressed and made-up as she was, it was hard to recognize the reflection. In her purse was the security codes needed for the second part of the op._

_She did not hurry, even though she was well aware of who should be waiting for her, after weeks and weeks of separation. Hurrying would draw attention._

_When she entered, the flat was only lit by the city lights reflecting off walls and floors. Only one window was unlocked, so he could slide in without notice. She discarded her purse as soon as she locked the door, her coat thrown on top of it._

_She saw the Winter Soldier’s night-shadow cast upon the floor before she caught his silhouette against the rain-glistened panes, sitting on the edge of the wide sill. It was never certain that he retained her from wipe-to-wipe, mission-to-mission, or that the Asset knew her for anything more than a fellow operative. Memory for him was more than fickle; it was engineered. But then she gave the first part of the mantra that was their agreed-upon passphrase, a secret and burning thread through all that they were commanded to do, and he responded in kind._

_He uncoiled himself from his recline, stalking towards her in the twilight, and she met him halfway, ready to feel either the cool metallic or flesh-warm palm on her cheek, his lips upon hers even though they had been pressed to another’s not twenty minutes ago._

_Rather than an embrace her passionately like she anticipated when she closed in, he clasped his articulated fingers on her right elbow and the birth-granted ones to the nape of her neck. Her muscles tightened even though her heart sank. They had been so, so careful with the bugs. Had their masters reconditioned him in some new way with the device?_

_“You are not yourself,” he declared. The only thing that stopped her from out-and-out panic was his tone and the slow shaking of his head._

_“I’m Natalia,” she whispered with conviction, staring into eyes and trying to desperately read him. “It_ is _me. I swear. Natalia.”_

_It was then that the fingers of his right hand snaked their way between her scalp and wig, easing the fake hair from its underpinnings that held it firmly on her head. In the silence, he let it drop to the bare floor without taking his gaze from her. With gentle efficiency and his face still cool and neutral, he extracted the bobby pins one-by-one and also let them descend to their feet, the slight ticking noise at their fall mimicking the rain tapping outside. It was almost mesmerizing._

_His gaze softened as lock by lock, her lover tugged at the red tresses until they fell to her shoulders. It was then, only then, he smiled, teeth flashing white. “I think I see you.” A silent step and he closed in, his hands drawing down to her waist as he dipped his chin. Tendrils of his own inky hair fell and brushed her temple. “Show me more,” he coaxed, close enough she could feel his breath._

_She felt her brow knit together as tried to piece together exactly what he was asking of her._

_“Oh...you mean like this?” She shifted her weight against him, trusting him to balance her as she pulled off one soft leather boot, then another, tossing them aside. They sounded like thunder when they met the floor. She shimmied the knee length skirt off next, until she was standing only in her scooped-neck sweater and undergarments. She hadn’t concealed weapons tonight, because she was uncertain how far she would have to take things with the security systems engineer._

_“Like that,” he affirmed. “But all of it. Even the jewelry.”_

_He kept his hands lowered at his side as he observed. It wasn’t long before she was completely nude before him. She had done a few strip-teases before, flirting and fetishizing each reveal. That wasn’t what the man behind the Winter Soldier was asking of her, either with his eyes or his mannerism. He wanted something else. The prickle of the cool air against her bared flesh was still seductive in its own fashion._

_“What is the name of your cover?” he then asked._

_“Nina,” she replied._

_“Will you go into the bathroom, take off Nina’s makeup, and wash away her evening from your skin? For me?” Another man may have made her disrobement about domination, showing her how vulnerable she was naked while he was dressed and armed with at least four hidden weapons. But that was not how they were; it was not what she believed he ever wanted them to be together. They both were too aware how many ways in which a person could be truly enslaved. “I’ll be in bed when you’ve finished.”_

_Closing the door of the bathroom behind her, she took a washcloth into the shower and scrubbed off the mask she wore. Perfume and smoke sluiced away with the glycerin soap. When she dried herself off, there was nothing left of her cover._

_Wrapping herself in the towel, she padded to the modest bedroom. The lamp near the nightstand was on, He sat upright and shirtless, white sheets tucked around his waist, looking over some schematics needed for the op._

_As she closed the door behind her, he smiled again at her before sliding open the nightstand drawer and slipping the papers within. He held out his hand to the space between them, inviting her close to him once more. This was different; this way of approaching each other, with such deliberateness. In past secret couplings, they were often hurried and rushed or completely spontaneous._

_Finally, finally his fingertips brushed the space between her shoulder blades, the polished metal hand clasped just below her hipbone as she gazed down to him on the mattress._

_“Do you know why I asked you to do all that?” he inquired, allowing his eyes to drink her in ways he hadn’t when she first arrived._

_“I was with a mark tonight,” she noted. “Back at his flat, we kissed and he touched me. But I spiked his drink before…”_

_“It’s about you much more than them,” he clarified, then his voice grew husky and deep with emotion. “I don’t want the lie you give to others. I only want_ you, _Natalia. Not Nina or Nadine or the two dozen other women you forget yourself to become.”_

 _“You want to be sure what we have is_ real?” she inquired, her heart widening.

_He closed his eyes, nodded slowly, the yearning and sadness touching the corner of his eyes while the rest of him was tensed. “Yes.”_

_Natalia immediately shed the towel and threw herself over him in a straddle, her hands cupping his jaw. “You’re a prize idiot if you think that I’d risk my life for something less than hopelessly real.” She didn’t give him time to rebut her as she caught his lips in her mouth. He chuckled deep in his throat, a boyish echo of wonder, hands closing on her ribcage and his thumbs brushing the eager skin at the base of her breasts._

_With her body, she determined to demonstrate just how true her need was. Without him to anchor to, she’d be adrift in a thick fog of identities and self-deceptions, a blank slate on which to be written and erased again. No choice. No preference. Nothing for her to declare as her own, special and cherished above a vague idea of nationalistic sentiment._

_It wasn’t long before his hand slipped between her thighs and his fingers pressed at her swollen folds. When she rose up slightly on her knees to offer him more, he teased at her slit and further, again and again from fore to aft, slicking her, until she whimpered into his shoulder. Every nerve ached for penetration, to be filled and stretched. Natalia was dimly aware that his erection was pinned by the sheets and her lust-slackened legs. But her bones were almost water now, and she couldn’t…_

_“I’ve got you,” he murmured after raking his teeth along her clavicle. When he eased two digits into her, his thumb sliding against her clit, she clenched and shivered and swore that if not for a cool and steadying palm on her ass, she’d have melted right off the bed. But he had her, had her velvety, heated flesh in his hand. Drawing out her pleasure with slow circles, languid curls of his fingers, Natalia sought out his mouth again, his stubble reddening her chin and neck._

_She was soaking now, the faint scent of her own arousal mingling with the rain in the air. As the rub of his thumb became, increment by increment, more vigorous, her breath began to catch and her hips roll and thrust against him of their own accord._

_Nails dug into one muscled and one unyielding shoulder as the mounting bliss between her thighs lay waste to every other part of her as she peaked, raggedly inhaling again and again so as to stifle what may have otherwise been a cry. A habit of Natalia to not be heard, to not be caught._

_Her hair was an utter mess, her body bloomed with sweat before his hand withdrew from inside her and he lifted her off of him by her waist. He eased her limp body down to the sheets beside him. Aftershocks trembled through her as his settled next to her. She reveled in the warmth of his chest pressed up against her back, silvery fingertips skimming over thighs and stomach._

_Natalia knew this for a brief respite. For when they had hours to themselves in the game of hurry-up-and-wait that was these missions, he drew their love-making out, sometimes for hours. Being so raw yet so safe, reminding themselves of each other...needs of the spirit, really, more so than the flesh._

_“I understand now,” she declared as soon as she had mastery of speech again, turning her head to meet him eye-to-eye. “Why you wanted me to do all that...before we did this tonight.”_

_Tenderly, the back of his birth-given fingers brushed her cheek. His pupils were dark, reflective pools where she saw herself. “I am nothing but a lost soldier without you. I’d nearly forgotten what home felt like, who I was before...when there was peace.” He clenched his teeth, his jaw tensing. ‘We can’t feed each other more lies and let ourselves swallow more illusions...not that and have something...something this good and beautiful.”_

_“Something real,” she added. “Naked.” Twisting fully towards him then, she found the hollow between his jaw and his collarbone to which she fit perfectly in like two jigsaw pieces. “And true.” Her arm drifted down to run her fingertips southwards on the raises and gullies of his abdomen, desire renewed. She tantalized at touching him further._

_“Natalia,” he breathed. Her name a prayer, a supplication._ “Natalia.”

_She reverently closed her eyes. If she only knew his birth name in return. She’d croon it while he thrust in her. She’d declare it in a hundred oaths that she was powerless to keep until she and he were liberated of the dictates, orders and conditioning._

James. _A clarionned revelation. A parting light, glowing through the curtains outside the bedroom, drawing her somewhere else. Somewhere away from him. Everything started fading away, growing fuzzy at the edges._

 _She tried to resist. Listen. Listen!_ Your name is James.

_A familiar three-four timed electronic melody started drowning her out, and she knew. Knew it was all about to be ripped away. Another dawn. Another whiteout. Erasure._

Natasha-once-Natalia gripped for her cellphone next to the motel nightstand and threw it and its alarm with prejudice against the wall.

* * *

As the tires of her motorcycle ate up the asphalt on her way back to DC, Natasha allowed herself to remember that it was the Winter Soldier who first introduced to her this means of travel. How, with enough skill and courage, she and her machine could nimbly evade larger vehicles and negotiate all sorts of terrain, from cityscapes to deserts. Behind blinks, she could see Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers racing each other on the SSR training grounds in England like two boys playing in a schoolyard, forgetting for a brief while that there was a war.

Enough.

Natasha made a stop at a public library after lunch on the road to use their photocopier. She didn’t want a full duplicate of the file detailing so many horrors over so many decades in so much cold, clinical terms. There was no guarantee the Ukrainians didn’t keep a copy themselves before handing it over. It’s what Natasha would have done. Yet there was a risk in replicating the records even further; with every copy was a greater chance that the contents would fall into the wrong hands.

There was actionable intel in all of it: names and initials of technicians and scientists and doctors and handlers over the decades. Steve would certainly figure out that, provided he could find someone he trusted to translate the Russian.

There was only one document Natasha was set on keeping word-for-word: a memo to the Academy that trained her. The names were redacted. Even hers. Although Natalia Alianovna Romanova was blacked out, Natasha debated whether to remove the original all-together, so Steve would never see it and never put both the ‘Red Room Academy’ on the memo and her leaked S.H.I.E.L.D. dossier together. No. She could not be that duplicitous, whatever else she feared.

The quarter was spent, the copy was made, and the folder slid back into her backpack. She didn’t pause to read it again so soon. She didn’t need to. While her ability to memorize text wasn’t eidetic, it was sharpened from years of spying.

**To: ~~REDACTED~~ , Headmistress, Red Room Academy  
** **From: ~~REDACTED~~ , Lead Supervisor, Winter Soldier Program  
** **Date: ~~REDACTED~~  
** **Subject: Termination of Inter-Program Operations Utilizing Subject Z-325**

~~~~~~~~~~~~

**It is the Directorate’s decision that all further cooperative operations and initiatives of the Red Room with the Winter Soldier Program are terminated. This decision is based largely on the report of our specialists who strongly advise that Subject Z-325 have no further exposure to Academy recruits and agents to prevent relapses in subject’s conditioning.**

**The Directorate has concluded that permitting Subject Z-325 to form an emotional attachment to Agent ~~REDACTED~~ as a solution to the ‘replication dilemma’ proved not only counter to Program goals but also detrimental to the subject’s future deployments. Forced separation from Agent ~~REDACTED~~ resulted in Subject Z-325 to behave violently and self-destructively until sedated. Stabilization required multiple recalibrations of cognitive protocols at the core level; long-term consequence of these measures is still unknown. Independent missions given to Subject Z-325 are temporarily suspended until full compliance is assured.**

**While our colleagues in the Kremlin applaud the many successes of your agents since your appointment, this incident has undermined confidence in the objective leadership of the Academy. It is within the interest of your continued oversight to assure Agent ~~REDACTED~~ ’s loyalty to the Motherland.  
**   


Tomorrow morning was the meet-up at Fury’s grave. Less than sixteen hours to figure out whatever she was going to say to Steve and Sam. If she knew Steve at all, he wouldn’t let the Winter Soldier disappear. Too much risk in Barnes becoming HYDRA’s again, too much heartache in the recollections of his best friend, the nearest thing Steve had to family. Was it possible to recover a ghost from years’ past? Could a man, unlike a mirror, be mended once shattered and splintered? Or must a shard be chosen from the pieces and all else swept away?

Natasha was amazed she could get to sleep that night at all. Perhaps it was the comfort of a familiar bed. Perhaps it was her need to finish what had been interrupted by the early morning’s alarm. When the half-formed and drifting thoughts descended, she threw the long neglected gates of ‘what ifs’ and ‘should haves’ open, embracing it all. Hopes waltzed with fears as she allowed herself to walk the corridors of past and future tense.

* * *

__

_The walls to either side of her were like no others: rugged, rough and cold. Hewn only by wind and water, the tall, snow-covered canyon walls flanked her to either side. The sky overhead was the same matte gray as the stone below. Having no downward slope or running stream to guide her, she simply walked. Natasha’s footsteps crunched below her._

_The crude walls widened briefly, and there was a fork, and then another. Not just a slot canyon, but a maze. Great. At least her footsteps in the snow would provide her with knowledge of where and in what direction she traversed._

_There was a presence just behind her now, heavier. For a moment her core trembled at the idea it was_ him _. She immediately thought embrace him and together they would figure out how to get out of this labyrinth. But no. The cadence was wrong._

_When she turned, it was the ‘specialist’ Dr. Fennhoff, a red bowtie contrasting against his grey tweed suit. Natasha tasted something fowl in her mouth._

_“You’ve come here to retrieve him, yes?” the aging man asked, curiosity in his voice. “To take your cherished Soldier away from this place for good?”_

_She tensed, debating on what to answer or do._

_“I can help you, my dear.” He sing-songed. “It’s a big decision. You should have an expert to help. My colleagues often talk of the mind; but the truth of a man, the psyche, is also a matter of heart.”_

_“Show me where he is,” she demanded. “Then leave us alone.”_

_“Ah, I could do that for you. Certainly.” the balding man acquiesced. “You want so much to deliver this broken man from all he has suffered. An avenging angel with hair of fire, yes? You are a credit to your Academy. It is good to see all that was planted decades ago bear such lovely fruit.”_

_The look she gave the doctor could have seared bedrock._

_“Very well! Very well!” Fennhoff appeased, which Natasha did not buy. “But it will not be as easy as you desire, my dear. There are many facets to a man such as him.”_

_The doctor motioned with a quick tilt of his head towards a passage she had yet to take. Natasha followed cautiously. It could very well be a trick, a trap, an ambush. Her options were few. The only thing she could do was be on guard._

_As they proceeded -- a left, past an intersection, then another left and quick right -- the canyon walls widened. Fennhoff had lead her to a dead end, empty but for her and him. Snowflakes, soft sparkles of diamond, drifted lazily in the air. Natasha looked at the rim above her, preparing to duck and roll if she be shot at by someone on high. There was no sign of James Buchanan Barnes._

_“What is this!?” she snapped. “You said you would take me to him.”_

_“You look up.” The doctor had a smug look on his face. “But what is below your feet?”_

_Below her boots was a few centimeters of snow. But under that?_

_Natasha fell to her knees, swiping the dusting away with her arms to find a crystalline clear sheet of ice. It was a hand first that she revealed, reaching towards the surface. As she swiped away more, frantically, a perfectly preserved and motionless form of a dark-haired man in an American uniform, the three chevrons of an Army sergeant on his sleeve. His eyes were open, staring up at her, a cry frozen on his mouth._

_She pounded on the ice with her forearms and was met with utter failure to even scratch it, so Natasha scrambled towards the cliff walls, her cold-stung hands searching for something she could use. Fennhoff simply stood to the side, his hands now in his pockets, calmly observing her panic. A wild thought arose of using the man’s skull as a bludgeon, his femur as an ice-pick._

_Finally her palm landed on an orange-sized rock, and she returned to her desperate task, even as she lost feeling in her fingers. A spider’s web crack radiated from her first strike._

_“Are you certain you wish to do that, Natalia?” her companion asked._

_“You’re not stopping me,” she declared, breathlessly renewing her efforts, as blow by blow, chip by chip, she neared him. Somehow if she could just brush his fingertips…_

_“Sergeant Barnes is all that Captain Rogers yearns to restore; his lost blood-brother,” Fennhoff continued. “What would happen, do you think, should that man find himself in the body he has now? Bucky Barnes didn’t thirst to go to war. He wanted to stay in the City, drink up all that his twenties had to offer him before settling down with a respectable woman in a house just next door to his best friend and make an extended family with ‘Uncle Steve.’”_

_She tried to ignore the doctor. His words that lanced like needles._

_“Tell me. Are you that respectable woman, Natalia? Could your womb bear him anything more than abominations? Would he loathe you as much as he loathed the red star we branded him with? Russian, both.”_

_The stone felt too heavy then in her deadened hand as she shuddered and clenched her eyes shut. Natasha shook her head. “You spout only poison,” she returned, but the tears gave away her doubts._

_“Would you prefer him like this?” Natasha heard Fennhoff snap his fingers, and the ice under her groaned and shifted. In surprise, she looked down again through her stinging pupils and beheld blood-tinged water beneath the layer of ice. Barnes now submerged, the remains of his left arm protruding raw bone from the torn sleeve of his navy blue peacoat._

_“This may appeal to you more,” he continued, his voice lulling her away from violence. “Broken and wracked by the agony of a phantom limb, he would cling to anyone that offers him a glimmer of release, swallow any truth you wished to give in the absence of his own memories. The solace and warmth of your body would dull his pain for some months, draw him away from the confusion. He’ll live for you. For the Captain. For a time. He will seem to get better.”_

_Tucking her frozen hands in her armpits to try to bring feeling back to them, Natasha asked miserably. “But then?” Because she guess at what Fennhoff’s game was now._

_“He reaches for the bottle; it takes so much to make him drunk, but he does it anyway. And ashamed for his weakness and for all the horrible things he’s discovered about what he has done for the Motherland and HYDRA, he aims a hollow-point round at the base of his own skull, figuring that all the serums in the world can’t save him if his brain stem is shredded. He was never a hero anyway. Not like Steve.”_

_Natasha swallowed back her own despair, asserting. “That will never happen.”_

_“Very astute, my dear.” There was something approving in the aging man’s voice. “Years have been spent purifying the Soldier of his faults, his weaknesses. Did you not envy him his perfection at first? Strong. Skilled. Beautifully honed and remorseless?”_

_Another snap of the fingers, and the water below the ice emptied of the wounded Howling Commando. Natasha simply waited on her knees, chilled and aching._

_“He molded the Black Widow in his image. There was a glorious time when you didn’t care what your mark or mission was, so long as he was with you. And now? Why suffer longer apart? Let the world fall down around you, let the blood and the cash flow, danger singing in your veins again. Aphrodisiac for a modern Bonnie and Clyde.”_

_Loki thought himself adept at manipulation. Fennhoff eclipsed him by far. Fennhoff didn’t require Clint to divulge her secret truths, the temptations that whispered to her in the hour of the wolf._

_Something under the ice stirred, a flash of silver from the depths surfacing. Natasha renewed her task, desperation in every swing now. And while she pounded the frozen water from above, the Soldier kicked from below. Their efforts put great fissures in the barrier between them._

_Steve had spent decades frozen. Certainly, if he could survive…_

Steve. _It was only Steve that Barnes had vaguely remembered. Only Steve that broke through his conditioning. Not her. She let out a bitter and agonized groan, her tears now raining hot upon the frozen landscape._

_“Oh, why let that get to you, Natalia? Why let that stand in the way of your love, when all you have to do is lure the Soldier into the chair again with promises to restore it all? Reprogram him anyway you like. You have the skills. Rogers would never have to know.”_

_And she would be no better than HYDRA._

_Fennhoff may be a brilliant mind, but he was a terrible dodger. Natalia’s stone hit him squarely between his eyes, and the man instantly slumped in his unconsciousness. The illusion of the Winter Soldier trapped below her faded, and she was left in the frost-bitten silence._

_Echoing against the canyon faces was only Barnes’ voice, his presence emanating from nowhere and everywhere. “Who do you want me to be?”_

_That very question she posed to Steve…_

_“I don’t know,” she replied, misery worse than the cold. “I can’t...I’m sorry.”_

_The only thing worse than not having the trust of a man like Steve was having no trust in herself. When it came to the fate of Barnes, she had no faith in her own motivations. Her heart made her dumb to any clear-headed, selfless course of action. The ghost of Dr. Johann Fennhoff had proven that._

_“Who do you want me to be, Natalia?”_

_“It’s not for me to decide, James,” she choked, feeling full-out sobbing coming on. She tucked her own legs close, wrapped her arms tightly around. “Please, just be_ free. _”_

_The presence left her._

Natasha awoke to her pillow damp against her cheek.

* * *

At 0950 the next day, Natasha hung back behind the trunk of a tree as Fury talked briefly with Sam and Steve at the foot of his own grave. She had already said what she needed to say to Nick back at that cabin, put that intel about HYDRA and Agent John Garrett in the new dead-drop; there wasn’t need to say much else. Natasha had a feeling he’d step out of the dark when the world needed him, much like the Avengers themselves.

In her hands was The File. Natasha flipped open the folder, just for one more look at the photo of the Bucky she had never known but that Steve could not help but see in the visage of the Winter Soldier.

When the men shook hands, she slipped out of her casual hiding spot and approached. Steve had a quietly determined look about him, but he was hale and sound, and that made up for her week of a battle of words with Congress and the Pentagon over the Triskelion Disaster. It felt good to be Captain Rogers’ shield for once. It put her in a good mood.

Steve took a few steps towards her. Sam politely gave them space.

He and she bantered about her covers, and with a sly smirk Natasha confirmed in so many words that she hadn’t minded doing what she did, exposing herself. Even if strangers and people-of-power condemned her, it didn’t matter as much as the admiration of a soul with the most integrity she had ever known.

She told herself that Steve deserved this chance. Even if he was in for terrible, terrible hurt.

“That thing you asked for,” Natasha began. “I called in a few favors from Kiev.” Favors was an understatement…

She passed Steve the file and he stared at it, contemplative.

“Will you do _me_ a favor? Call that nurse?” she pressed, because the blond man needed a future as well as a past, if his heart was going to survive the revelations dug up on his search at all. Sharon Carter was a through-line of generations, an echo of her great-aunt. And even if the two wouldn’t end up lovers, Sharon would at least keep an eye on Steve when Natasha couldn’t.

An almost awkward silence fell between them, and rather than fall to the temptation to tell Steve _everything_ , she gave him a send-off kiss on the cheek.

But as she turned, she felt a sudden remorse. If she told him nothing at all, then he couldn’t prepare for at least the first psychic blow, whether it was about her and the Winter Soldier, or any other difficult truth his chase of a ghost would uncover.

“Be careful, Steve,” she warned enigmatically, a taste of sadness as she faced Rogers once more. “You might not want to pull on that thread.”

And Steve, honoring Natasha as Natasha, didn’t press her. Spies needed their shadows, after all. And soldiers? Soldiers needed their memories.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that the #Buckynat Mini Bang anon is lifted, I want to praise Sarah (TKA [sketchandsquee](http://sketchandsquee.tumblr.com/)) for her amazing art for me and also for volunteering for another writer, too. It was my first collaboration of this type, and the work with her was fun and a great chance to get to know another of the fandom.
> 
> And if you really, really liked what I wrote here and are a fan of Buckynat fics, I'd like to point you to my [ _Wolves at the Door_ ](http://archiveofourown.org/series/115894)series for more MCU-style Natasha & Winter Soldier.


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